In the light of several recent high-profile twitter account hacks such as The Associated Press, The Guardian and NPR, the news that twitter is trialing two-step authentication is welcome.

However this change, when implemented, may catch unprepared agency and corporate tweeters on the back foot and unable to post from accounts.

The issue stems from Twitter’s choice of security solution – mobile confirmation. When the new system is in place, logging in from a new location will require users to enter a password and a randomly generated code sent to their mobile device.

If this device is owned and registered by any one individual it will mean that this single person will have responsibility for authenticating access for all agency, internal or customer service account users that want to log on.

Inevitably it raises issue for corporate governance and will create confusion as there’s almost no way this person will know which user requested authentication.

Two possible solutions exist for this dilemma. If you can think of any more we’d love to hear them in the comments.

The first, register your Twitter account to a web accessible phone number such as Google Voice or Skype. This will allow multiple people to access the much needed verification messages as and when required.

The second, get yourself a content management system (CMS) such as Hootsuite or CoTweet so that you avoid logging into Twitter in the first place. Unless these services also introduce two-step authentication you should have no problem logging in as usual from any device.

Whether or not the above solutions are viable for your organization people need to start having these conversations now, while there’s still time to establish responsibilities and an authentication process.

Those that don’t… well, you won’t hear from them. Not on Twitter at least.

Inevitably it has led to people calling time on Facebook. Advocates of the new platform claim that we head to Google+ if we want our brands and communities to thrive.

The challenge with these comments is that they assume, wrongly in my view, that Facebook and Google are competing for the same territory and that their features, updates and users are after different flavours of the same thing.

Going through some old image folders I came across these wordles (actually they are tagxedos) that I made a while back when the service was still new; so I thought I’d share.

The idea behind this was to take the entire text from famous books and create word clouds from them in the shape of the title (or key character). See if you can guess which books I wordled below (mouse over for the answers).

The below is an email reaction that I had to this blog post by Danah Boyd (a researcher at Microsoft Research New England) which was sent around the office.

This blog’s been sitting in drafts for 3 months and so it’s about time I posted it seeing as I seem to be making the same point at every SM event I attend these days and really, I’ve just got to stop. The point I’ve realised that I was trying to make all these months ago when I first drafted this blog is that the current crop of social media platforms do not adequately reflect the way we socialise offline oh and that information decay is an essential part of the social experience.

It’s an excellent article so give it a read and then, I’d love to hear your thoughts on my take on it all, if it inspires any.

Alastair

Some teens are using Facebook in a very different way from me – are these habits familiar to you guys?

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The girls’ actions aren’t familiar to me but I think the article and observations make for some pretty compelling reading.

“Internet Comics” brings you… Batman Vs. Longcat! Sadly not a real series but the 5 comic cover mockups over on College Humor are excellent.You really should click through and have a look.

Despite not normally the biggest fan of College humor (I don’t think Europeans are really their target audience anyway) I have to agree with many of the commenters that this is totally brilliant! If this idea was fleshed out into a real series available in the shops I’m sure it’d be a massive hit amongst fans and collectors alike.

Despite having name that’s going to immediately put most people to sleep and an incredibly underwhelming poster I think that Source Code is probably going to turn out to be one of the better cinematic moments of 2011, if not an opening weekend blockbuster.

Source Code itself is a mix between the Bourne films and Quantum Leap and sees our hero (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) leaping into the body of a man who has only 8 minutes left to live and when I say leaping I mean leaping.

The leaper (Jake) is transported into the body of his doomed flesh donor from the future through the use of a strange computerised device. When he arrives he’s disorientated, has partial to total amnesia but usefully manages to retain all of his skills and language abilities from before the leap. There’s no Al and no Ziggy and throughout he only ever leaps into one person’s body but really now… I hope Scott Bakula at least gets an invite to the premier.

The time travel device (let’s call it the accelerator) taps into something called the Source Code and allows users to experience the last 8 minutes of anyone’s life before it vomits the user back out into the present. Our hero Jake therefore finds himself as a passenger on a train that’s destined to explode exactly 8 minutes after he realises what’s going on and he has just those 8 minutes to work out who causes the explosion and why.

Here’s the trailer so see for yourself.

As a huge fan of Quantum Leap, 12 monkeys, the Bourne films and that other film with Tom cruise and the precogs whose name escapes me… I think this is going to be great fun to watch. That is of course as long as the film lasts longer than the 8 minutes it takes Jake to explode.